The TellTale Googly Specs
by CosmicKitten89
Summary: NOT a parody of "The Tell-Tale Heart", although similar themes are addressed.  Ludwig's POV.
1. Egad!

(Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters from the Mario games – you know who they are.)

For once I was in bed – and during these rare times, I have difficulty getting out.

And in most cases, I don't want to.

"Ludwig Von Koopa, you get your ass out of bed and in the shower and on the bus for school this instant or you're going in the dungeon to play Pit Boss when you get home!"

_Yeah, like I can do all of that in the same instant,_ I sass in my own mind. I rouse myself and force my body to shower, transforming my Kooky hair into Ludwig van Beethoven hair.

I did not spend four months earning an accelerated Bachelors of Mad Science at Frankenstein University in the Bavarian Alps – as a toddler, no less! – to condescend to the level of my comparatively retarded siblings at the Mushroom Kingdom Academy. If Father – pardon me, _King_ Father – did not insist that I attend grades K through 12 for the sake of "social development" (as though any of that might happen whilst being at best shunned out of jealousy and at worst physically tormented for that same reason!) I would have been a Dr. Ludwig Von Koopa a long time ago.

I grab a white chocolate Milka bar to eat for breakfast and wait with my idiot siblings for the bus (because my Father the King is too cheap to afford a chauffeur, and too lazy to drive us himself).

School is so insipid that my brain goes alpha just thinking about it. Insipid, know-it-all teachers. Insipid, poorly mannered classmates, including my own King Father's degenerate spawn – too immature to study, and too mentally challenged to understand the material even if they did. Insipid assignments that require an act of will to not procrastinate on (not that any rushed lack of quality will show if I do them at the last minute).

_One more year_, I whisper to myself.

Today my physics teacher makes an announcement: Professor Elvin Gadd is scheduled to come tomorrow.

E. Gadd was my scientific hero – or at least he was at a time during which I was immature enough to degrade myself with idol worship. My mantra now is to be the idol I would want to worship.

Anyway, this should be interesting. Perhaps, with E. Gadd around, I might have the chance to do some blabbing for myself instead of allowing the teachers to do all the blabbing as they normally do.

And I know exactly which invention to show him.


	2. Boy, Are We Smart!

(Disclaimer: I DO NOT OWN ANY OF THESE CHARACTERS!)

"Yes… Yes!" I laugh my maniacal laugh, the one I made in public all the time as a child, of which I am now so embarrassed that I seldom do it outside the lab.

It was an absurdly large contraption – it didn't have to be, but I was in too much of a rush to spend the time perfecting tinier machine parts.

I invited my siblings down to the lab.

The older four of the six nitwits growled and grumbled, wondering what was going on that would be of any interest to them. Iggy and Lemmy were just excited to be in the lab, and I asked Roy to hold on to them.

"Patience, patience, everybody! Now, as for the reason I asked you all to come down here: How would you all like to become geniuses like me?

The siblings stared at me. I wasn't sure what sort of expression was on their faces; perhaps each of them felt differently about such a prospect?

"Allow me to elaborate. Roy, if you were a genius, you would be able to bully others mentally as well as physically! Morton, if you were a genius, you would be able to earn passing grades without breaking a sweat and still have time for rock and roll! Larry, if you were a genius, you wouldn't have to spend all of your hard-stolen coins on tutoring fees! Wendy, if you were a genius, you would be able to figure out instantly which stores at the mall have the best deals on the garbage you like!"

Lemmy bounced up and down on his ball. "And if I were a genius, I would be able to learn how to juggle!"

"Exactly!" I exclaimed.

"Well, I'm not putting my head in that brain suctionizy thingy," said Wendy.

"Yeah, you don't even know if it works, do ya?" asked Roy. "You're usin' us as guinea pigs, aren't ya? Why don't you test it on yourself, huh?"

"Because my genius is already at its limits," I explained. "If I expanded it anymore, it would be crossing the line between genius and insanity."

"You've already done crossed it," said Roy.

"Well, is anyone ready for a test run?"

"I am!" shouted Lemmy.

"Over here." I strapped Lemmy into the seat, attached the helmet to his head, and analyzed the brain image on the screen while I adjusted the controls.  
>"Cool, I get to wear a funny hat!" says Lemmy. He laughs until he feels the jolt crash through his skull – at which point he screams.<p>

Lightning flashes over my siblings' terrified faces.

"Lemmy, are you all right?" Wendy asks when it was over.

"I'm fine, it didn't even hurt, only tickled…"

Lemmy swerves around dizzily.

"Woww… I can see pictures inside my head! Really clear pictures too! This hasn't happened since I overdosed on Iggy's medication!"

"Great, so ya made him an acid head!" shouts Roy.

"So… dizzy… with numbers and words… and shapes… Hey, I'm not dyslexic anymore! I'm reading your textbook, Ludwig! I'm doing your derivative problems! I'm all done!"

I check the homework he had done for me.

"It's all… correct…."

"It is? Yay! I'm a genius like you now! Now I'm going to learn to juggle!"

Lemmy bounces out of my lab, happy as a clown.

I put on my best triumphantly sinister smile. "Next victim?"

"Me first!" shouts Wendy. "I want to be able to do my homework super quickly too!"

Roy pushes her out of the way, Morton swears, Larry whines as he tries to squiggle past them.

"It's OK, you all are going to have a turn! How about we do it in order from oldest to youngest!"

"Why can't it be ladies first!" whines Wendy.

"I sigh. "Fine. Ladies first, then oldest boy to youngest boy."

I test it on them one by one. Wendy, then Roy, then Morton, then Larry, then Iggy.

"Wow!" says Wendy. "Boy, am I smart! I still hate math, though. But I can do it now! Now I can get my homework done right away so King Daddy can let me go shopping – omigosh! I have been spending way too much on designer brands that don't really look any different from the knockoffs! And now I know that 5 coins for 3 and a half inches of lipstick is a better deal than 4 coins for 2 and a half inches of lipstick! Unless the diameter is sufficiently skinnier to decrease the volume-to-price ratio… I better bring a tape measure!"

Morton says, "Well, I'm going to get my Bio homework done so I can bring my D+ in that class up to a C! No, make that a B! What the heck, I may as well make it an A"!

"I just come up with a really good plan to make lots of money!" says Larry. "But right now I'm just going to head up to my room to… expand my… intellectual horizons."

"Same here," says Roy. "Now the nerds at school won't be able to say that I'm just picking on them because I'm jealous of their smarts anymore! Ha!"

Iggy wanders around the room dizzily. He sits down and ogles my chemistry equipment, drooling, and reaches out a hand to touch the beaker filled with glowing blue fluid.

Still the same old Iggy.

Iggy's brain, as demented as it was, did not respond to the treatment, being that it was designed to enhance the intelligence of normal brains.

I coax Iggy away from the apparatus and make him exit my lab.

"Go play with Lemmy," I say.

"Where's Lemmy?"

"Learning how to juggle, I presume."

"But juggling's too hard!"

"Well, you don't have to juggle. Just watch."

I close the door and giggle in delight.

Just wait until Professor Gadd finds out how _smart_ I am!


	3. The Googles

(Disclaimer: I do not own these characters!)

Knowing that the bus would not accommodate my ingenious Geniusificator machine, I disassemble it, load it onto a wagon, and drag it the whole way to school. It took me an hour to get it there, but that's only twenty minutes more than the bus, with its circuitous path around the kingdoms to pick up children in far-flung places and drop off at different schools, would take. I reassemble it in the back of the stage at the auditorium.

At the start of physics class, I run out to the auditorium early to catch myself a seat close to the stage. This assembly is apparently optional; none of my siblings are present. Surprising; I would have expected that now that they were smart, they would have interest in and appreciation for such an event. Of course, if their personalities apart from their intellects have remained the same, it wouldn't surprise me if they used the assembly as an excuse to ditch class.

I find that my body is shivering with adrenaline, which the glands on the sides of my kidneys have excreted to prepare me for the _shock_ of meeting the famed inventor Elvin Gadd.

_Get a grip on yourself, you pathetic fanboy_, I say to myself. _Giddy over another inventor whose shadow you SHALL NOT live under… you should be ashamed!_

The auditorium darkens, the lights on the stage turn on and E. Gadd suddenly POOFs out of nowhere. Everyone oohs and ahhs at Gadd's little trick, which I happen to know is merely sleight of hand, combined with dry ice.

Gadd is a short little guy in a lab coat with a round nose that is pinker than the rest of his face, a prominent single buck tooth like mine only not sharp, a ghostly pouf of white hair, and a pair of spectacles with swirly marks on them, like Iggy's, except that Iggy's have dark frames.

Iggy would love those glasses.

Gadd yaks and yaks and shows off some of his many, MANY inventions. No more interesting than an average class day with Sir Yaksalot explaining the principle of momentum, using football metaphors, to the lesser intellects of the class and chastising me for interrupting with questions about quantum mechanics (which are beyond his scope). His speech, after all, needs to be adapted to a HIGH SCHOOL audience. I feel ashamed of even looking forward to this.

I pull out my iPhone to occupy my mind with the many apps it contains (I'd surf the Internet, but this school does not have Wi-FI).

"Say, sonny, you don't mind puttin' yer fancy gizmo away while I'm talking, do you?"

I made a grunting sigh. I regretted sitting in the front row.

I raise my face to defiantly glower at him, putting on the most sullen expression I can manage. That expression, I imagine, changes when my pupils meet the centers of the swirls on his specs.

Gadd's glasses are thick, over a centimeter so by my reckoning, and he might have empty scarred gashes for eye sockets and I wouldn't know it from the glare. But the glare did not weaken the impact of the swirls.

The swirls spiral inward clockwise – no, inward counterclockwise – no, one spirals inward clockwise and the other one inward counterclockwise… the left one – no, the right one – no, his right, no, my right…

I am losing my grip. The spirals are _moving._ They swirl inward and inward – or is it outward and outward…apparently I am no longer able to mentally distinguish the two… am I being hypnotized?

I shiver as my glands squeeze out more adrenaline.

I shake my head out of it and blink my eyes tightly, as if to wake up from a dream. E. Gadd is still there, and the swirls on his specs are still in spiraling motion.

"Now, sonny, if you don't put that gadget away, you will have to hand it here. I'm sorry, but that's the rules."

I nod and put my iPhone away. I want to turn away from his googly glasses, but I cannot.

I would have moved to a seat at the back of the auditorium so that I could play on my phone without being disturbed, but I am transfixed to the sight of the googly man's glasses. He turns his head to my left, and I see that the swirling motion disappears. Do the glasses only swirl when he's looking directly at me? Can the other people he's looking at see the swirls swirling? How am I even aware of this? Oh, because adrenaline's chill has heightened my perception…

It must be a scientific parlor trick, I think to myself. I hesitantly raise my hand to ask him. The way I feel is completely irrational. What's more, it's shameful. There is no reason for I, Ludwig Von Koopa, Master of Horror and frequenter of Ghost Houses to fear a pair of googly specs, no matter what sort of trick, whether it be an optical illusion or – something else – it is jinxed with…

E. Gadd turns around and notices my invention.

"Egad! What is this? A fantastic doodad created by one of you bright young whippersnappers?"

Gadd plays around with it and turns it on. "Astounding! Now, which one of you young'uns did it? Huh?"

I lower my hand. The entire crowd is silent. I feel the sensation of a hundred eyes pricking at me; are they all indicating me?

"is it you?" E. Gadd points it in the center of the crowd, and I know it's me because his glasses start swirling again. "I get the feeling it is!"

My eyes grow wider and more terrified, but Gadd does not seem to notice.

"Hmm, you do look familiar…say, you wouldn't happen to be King Koopa's eldest son Ludwig Von Koopa, would you? The one he's always braggin' about?"

Gadd brings his face closer to mine. He smells… not like old man, not at all… but like ectoplasm, like someone who either works around ghosts all the time, is possessed by, one, or _is_ one. The chill to my nostrils from this otherworldly scent only freezes me further.

"Tongue-tied, aren't ya? Well, if nobody has any more questions, then I guess I'm done here!"

Too frozen to applaud with the rest of the audience, I watch as he toddles off stage and, long after the crowd has disassembled, heads out the back door.

The moment he disappears from here, the throttle in my heart turns on and I flee the auditorium.


	4. Flavor Shotz

(Disclaimer: same as last chapter.)

I board the bus, my body in a zombie-like stiffness, at the end of the day, and sit next to my girlfriend Karma. She had also been at the assembly, but had very wisely chosen to sit in the back row. She had raised her hand to ask E. Gadd a question, which means that Gadd had, at one moment, been staring directly at her, so that she could fall victim to the swirlies. They were large enough to be noticed even from the back row, I am sure.

"K-Karma, when you asked E. Gadd your question, and he was looking straight at you… did you see the swirls on his glasses swirling round and round?"

"No. Don't tell me you have."

"Well, did you see them swirling when he was staring at me?"

Karma sighs and flips her perfumed blue hair. "No. Ludwig, you really need to lay off the Koopaccinos. The caffeine is messing with your head. And you also need to get more sleep. Studies have shown that sleep deprivation can cause hallucinations."

I absentmindedly play with Karma's hair, trying to identify the scent… exotic, fruity, or floral, with a hint of…

"Not to mention symptoms of ADD!" She pulls her hair away from me.

"But I've been sleeping more than usual lately!"

"Oh, well…" Karma briefly pauses, a pensive look on her face. "Maybe for your specific biochemistry, oversleeping is the equivalent of sleep deprivation in others."

"This has nothing to do with my sleep habits or my caffeine intake! It's…" I pause, not wanting to degrade myself with ineloquent "um's" and "uh's".

"You're scared of the Professor's glasses," says Karma. "You believe that they're haunted."

I swallow. "It's completely irrational, Even if is a ghost, why would it be messing with me?"

"It's something that you need to investigate. But honestly, Ludwig, I believe that you're going just a little bit crazy. But then, you were a little bit crazy to begin with."

Karma leaves the bus in the middle of town to walk to wherever she lives. She has never invited me to her place. For once, I am relieved for her to leave.

I get off at the Shellz station by the castle to get myself another Koopaccino, screw what Karma says. Today I am feeling like a caramel macchiato with a shot of hazelnut. I press large on the touch screen ordering kiosk, then I press for caramel, then I press for whipped cream and a double shot. The screen finishes my order without asking me what flavor I would like the extra shot to be, nor whether I would like a third shot.

Stupid make-to-order machine. I want a shot of caramel and a shot of hazelnut, but I can only get a double shot of one or the other. When my number comes up, I request another shot, this time of _hazelnut._

The Troopa who had been making my drink sighed. "Sir, that will be another thirty cents."

As if to deter me, a wealthy Koopa prince, from imploring him to perform the hardship of pumping the nozzle of hazelnut flavor! "And I would also like a shot – no, a double shot of white chocolate.

"Another coin."

How exorbitant. I hand him a coin and a 30/100's of a coin piece.

"Plus tax."

I laugh and show him my royal ID, proof that any tax that gets paid by me just goes back to me anyway.

"All right, sir, here's your order, you have a nice day."

"You forgot the whipped cream." Whipped cream is free, dammit!

With false enthusiasm, the Troopa sprays a fancy dollop of whipped cream onto my drink. I take my special order without so much as a "thank you" for a tip. Insolent behavior such as his will not be tolerated once I am King. Had he been polite about it, he would have been rewarded for his additional service.

I suck down the hot drink, and I can feel the heat being generated from my caffeine-revved heart. My eyes begin to feel even wider and more protrusive than normal. I am now in my mad-scientist mode – just what I need to take my mind off the googly specs.

I have not been in my lab for one minute when I hear several claws knocking on my door.

"Who dares to disturb me!" I roar.

I open the door and find the angry faces of geniuses Wendy, Morton, Roy, and Lemmy.

"We don't want to be smart anymore!" shouts Wendy. "I am tired of being able to do differential equations in my head! It is real distracting when I'm trying to keep alert during a crazy sale!"

"And I can't enjoy my heavy-metal anymore!" screams Morton. "All I want to listen to now is Beethoven and Mozart and Bach shit!"

"And I… Well, I actually wanted to thank you personally for making me a smart cookie, Kooky," says Roy. He takes both of my hands and shakes them in his mighty grip. "You were right! Now I can intellectually mug all da nerds and da otha bullies as well!"

Lemmy says, "Well, I did learn how to juggle!" He begins to toss and catch smaller versions of the ball he was balancing on up and down. He staggers, and all of his balls fall to the floor.

"Must… not… juggle balls…" Lemmy convulses on his big ball, twitching like Iggy under a panic attack. "Must… juggle… matrix elements!"

Lemmy rolls off the ball. He climbs back on top of it, clutching his head.

"This brain is a burden, Ludwig. Please, rid me of it!"

Oh, brothers. I give them intelligence, and yet they're still not smart enough to use it.

"Where's Larry?" I ask. "Does he not want a refund for his brain as well?"

"I dunno, he's in his room programming a video game," said Morton. "Now, please, GIVE US OUR OLD BRAINS BACK!"

"Except for me!" says Roy, who swaggers away, whistling.

"Well, I am sorry, but right now the Geniusificator is at the school, so you will just have to wait until tomorrow," I told them.

Wendy, Morton, and Lemmy walk off, still angry but satisfied at least that they will be back to normal tomorrow.

I sigh. Perhaps I should practice my music tonight.

I head up to the high tower above my room where I keep the instruments. The acoustics up here are phenomenal. I begin to play spontaneously, which is probably not a good idea for tonight, because that is the method I normally use to interpret my emotions – and I want to change what I'm feeling, not dwell on it.

The melody of my mood is dark and sinister, as usual. I am chilled by the notes that my heart is playing. The notes repeat and repeat themselves cyclically, like the – perish the thought! I press the keys more frantically, and my heart dreads what will come next in the musical sequence.

It was an excellent song, but it was a _fear_ song. I decide to play something light and cheery.

Light and cheery. Ugh. I am really not myself today. I must take my mind off of – no, I dare not even THINK it!

The sweet melody I am composing sounds false, with a sour note of thinly disguised fear.

I immediately switch to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Beautiful, uplifting, holy…

My trembling fingers slip and hit the wrong notes. Even worse, the wrong notes that I hit are exactly the right notes to transform the Ninth into a beautifully dark and hideous horror song.

Tonight is not the night for music. The tower is dark in the evening – an environment I normally find comforting, but tonight, in my current state of mind, I jump at every sudden sight and sound as if I had just seen or heard a specter-

"KIDS WHO WANTS TO VISIT THE GHOST HOUSE?"

I jump at my father's roar. Not me, not tonight. Tonight is _definitely _not the night for ghost house gallivanting.

Perhaps I should get some sleep…

One of the reasons why I hate sleep so much is that I have no control over my thoughts while I'm subconscious. Tonight, I did not want to relinquish that control. Still, I could use the comfort of lying in bed…

I pull apart the covers and sit up in my bed, playing with my iPhone so that I can distract my mind from thoughts of sleep. I use the castle's Wi-Fi to surf the internet for videos to watch. I am suddenly in the mood for cartoons.

_Cartoons._ Even as a child I had disdain for their puerile humor and slapstick violence. And yet, I find myself laughing, if somewhat hoarsely, at the characters being squashed.

I yawn. I regret forgetting to ask the Troopa at Shellz to put an extra shot of espresso in my drink. I lift myself out of bed to go downstairs to ask the royal kitchen staff to fix me a raspberry vanilla dark chocolate mocha. No, make that a raspberry vanilla _white_ chocolate mocha. No darkness. I want –I _need_ – light and fruity…

**I do love writing in Ludwig's POV! So dark and twisted, like a darker, more arrogant version of me! Great way to let out one's personal angst. BTW, Shellz is a spoof of Sheetz, a gas station shop found only in the Allegheny region of the United States (Western Pennsylvania and the surrounding states).**

**Do stay tuned… the real horror has yet to begun…**

**Boy, am I smart!=P**


	5. Liquefied

(Disclaimer: Do I need to repeat myself? I OWN NOTHING!)

I crawl out of bed and creep down the corridors to the kitchen. I find myself behind an enormous lady Magikoopa who is mopping the royal kitchen.

"Um, ma'am, would you mind-"

The Magikoopa continues mopping as if she hasn't heard me.

"Ma'am, if you don't mind-"

She is humming to some song. I see the Bluetooth in her ear.

"Ma'am, I would like-"

I try to get around to her front, but she makes it difficult by constantly spinning with equal angular velocity so that her back is always up against my front, rather like the light side of the moon (which, by the way, rotates at just the right angular velocity to keep the dark side from ever being shown).

"Ma'am, as the Crown Prince of the Koopa Dynasty, I command you to fix me a white chocolate raspberry vanilla mocha with a double – no, triple shot of espresso!"

I deliver a sharp kick to her rear. At this point the moon in this analogy finally rotates to reveal its dark side.

She had been possessed by the GOOGLY SPECS!

I turn around to run. My head spins around 180 degrees as I do so that I can see the specs as they swirl and swirl.

My brain swirls round and round with the spirals, like the contents of a blender set to "liquefy". Swirl… Swirl… Swirl… Swirl… Every thought other than …swirl… is pushed out of my head. My brain is reduced to a basal ganglion whose only function is to perceive the …swirl…

This is not one of those dreams in which the dreamer feels too physically weak to move or even talk. Rather, this is the mental analogue of that sort of dream. The neuronal soup in my skull churns into a vortex, and like in a whirlpool, I am being flushed…

I wake up, and my mind is sharp again. I check my antique Swiss grandfather clock.

Four in the morning.

I need to get out of this castle. Some bracing crack-of-dawn air will clear my head. I creep down the corridors, avoiding life wherever my other three relevant senses detect it so that I can avoid the heart attack of seeing something whose specs may or may not be googles.

Good thing that Shellz is open 24/7.

I brace myself to bitch at the likely incompetent whose shift runs through this hour. I step into the store and peer cautiously around. The person at the counter is free of googly specs.

I sigh in relief and stand behind the small human who is currently ordering at the kiosk.

Drowsy from serotonin, I am slow in my observations about this person. His clothing is white, and his head, as viewed from behind, is mostly bald, but for a shock of white on top-

E. Gadd!

I practically fly out of the store and run the entire way to the bus stop. Who needs caffeine with this adrenaline rush!

I pant and pant and pant. For crying out loud, how long does he have to stay in town? I can understand that he must be a night owl also, but for crying out loud, what is _he_, an old man no less, doing there at 4 in the morning?

I remain at the bus stop, my eyes wide open in case he should appear. I probably should go back to bed for the next couple of hours, but I dare not risk crossing paths with him again by taking the path back to the castle.

Dawn creeps up. Knowing that Gadd is most likely long gone from Shellz, I am nevertheless in no hurry to get back there. Despite having a foggy mind from lack of caffeine, I never, ever want to go to Shellz again.

_This is unhealthy, _I think to myself_. You must think of some solution. Recall your dream… shudder… for your genius mind, brilliant even whilst subconscious, must have buried the solution within._

Another advantage to sleep deprivation, as far as I'm concerned, is the creative, dreamlike quality with which it colors your thoughts. Not helpful in the case that requires logic, though.

The swirls reduce your brain to mush. But they only swirl while you are looking at them. Everybody else's brain is already mush, and Gadd – or perhaps the spirit within Gadd – is setting out to wipe out all brilliance apart from his own.

_But why not Karma? Is she not brilliant enough to be the target of Gadd's sick experiment? If she is not, then she is not worthy to enjoy the status of being my girlfriend. _

_She's lying, _I think._ She's also frightened and embarrassed about her reaction to the swirls. Or perhaps she's already been thoroughly hypnotized…_

The sky is pink. It will now not be long before the bus comes to drag me out to the Mushroom Kingdom, where I must go to school thanks to King Father's unwillingness to fund for education for the citizens of Dark Land. That will all change when I become ruler…

If my mind survives the googly vortex, that is…

I feel it behind me. with what sense, I do not know, but I feel it.

I turn around and see it.

"E-gaaaaaaad!"

I tear the wretched glasses from his face, and I stomp them to the ground until the frames are bent at some parts, in pieces at others, and the thick lenses are good and cracked.


	6. One of those Funny OneEye Glasses

(Disclaimer: Aww, forget it.)

"Kooky, I can't see! My glasses are gone!"

Iggy. I had swiped and broken Iggy's glasses.

"Kooky, who took my glasses?" Iggy was beginning to cry.

A genius idea dawns suddenly on me (the most genius ideas almost always do), and my face twitches into the evilest, kookiest grin.

"They were taken by a monster! He's a short little man with white hair and a white science coat like mine!"

"That doesn't sound like a monster," said Iggy.

"He doesn't look like a monster, or act like a monster, but in reality, he is half man, half creepy, scary GHOST!"

"Kooky… Get my glasses back from him!"

I snort at that move. Perhaps my idea isn't so genius after all.

"You've got to be brave, Iggy! If you can face up to Mario and Luigi, then you can take on this silly old ghost!"

"B-but Mario hurt me! He stomped on me and took my magic wand away, and he kicked me into the lava!"

"Ah, but you did beat Luigi, didn't you?"

"Y-yes…"

"Well, if you can take on Luigi, then you can take on a stupid old ghosty man! You remember the Boos at the Ghost House, don't you? Harmless to us Koopas!"

Iggy looks up at me, his eyes squinting and unfocused. He is going to need to be able to see if he was going to take on E. Gadd.

I pick up one of the lenses I had smashed. It is still intact, having been made out of the toughest glass Koopa fire can forge, with only spider web cracks throughout.

"Here." I place the lens onto Iggy's eye. "Hold onto it with your eye muscles. You are going to be wearing a monocle today."

"What's a monocle?"

"It's like glasses, except there's only one of them."

"It looks like a cool spider web!"

"Can you see?"

"Yes."

"Good." That's my brother – too moronic to even realize that it's a lens from his own pair that I stepped on.

"Hey, monocles are what those fancy guys on television wear!" Iggy suddenly realizes.

I smirk at his little epiphany. "Yes, they are."

The other siblings finally arrive to the bus stop, each of them with a drink from Shellz.

"Hey, would one of you please let me have some of your coffee?"

Wendy laughs. "Get your own! Besides, I got a smoothie."

"I will pay you if you buy me one."

"Sure!" says Larry, ever eager for money.

"Wait a minute," says Roy, "why are you all of a sudden paying for a coffee gofer when Shellz is right down the block?"

"Yeah, and why is Iggy wearing one of those funny one-eye glasses – I-I mean, monocles – instead of his glasses?" asks Lemmy.

"And why is full of hairline fractures?" asks Morton.

The crowd glares at me.

"Ludwig….?"

Five genius brains against my one. Luckily, I made sure that they weren't _quite_ at my level.

"Hey, it's none of your business! If you want to ask questions and argue instead of doing as asked, you will miss out on a tip! Larry, get me a double white chocolate mocha, large, with a shot of vanilla, a shot of raspberry, and a double shot of espresso. The rest of the coins are yours. And don't forget the whipped cream!"

"You got it!" Larry takes the money and runs back into Shellz.

I sip the drink he carries out for me minutes later.

"Larry… You only got one shot of white chocolate."

"Hehe… You can taste that?"

"Hand it here."

Larry reluctantly handed me the one coin that the extra shot would have cost.

The reason I don't make him go back in and get me another shot of white chocolate is that the bus is now here. I boarded and insisted on sitting next to Iggy, much to Lemmy's dismay.

"Now, Iggy, when you see the funny ghost man, here's what you do. You don't kick him or bite him. All you do is take the glasses. He is helpless without his glasses, so he won't hurt you. Then you can stop wearing the monocle. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"What do you do when you see the funny man?"

"I do not kick him or bite him. I take the glasses and run! If he can't see, he can't hurt me."

"Good." Iggy is paraphrasing my words to some extent, instead of reciting verbatim. Perhaps the Geniusificator had some effect after all.

Still, this is pathetic. I am sending a child, and a mentally disabled one at that, my brother no less, to fight my battles.

I shrug it off. E. Gadd is harmless, after all. What is he going to do – google Iggy to death?

I wonder about using Gadd's glasses as a replacement pair. It is unlikely that they match Iggy's prescription. Iggy requires trifocals, plus correction for extreme astigmatism. But more pressingly, I wonder about what the glasses will do once Iggy, rather than Gadd, is the wearer.

But stealing the glasses is only Part One of my genius plan!

Woohoohoo-woo-hoo-woo!

**Yes, I know the story is slow, but… Keep on reading!:)**


	7. To Geniusificate Or Not to Geniusificate

(Disclaimer: I do not own the Koopalings (well, DUH!))

E. Gadd is probably still packing up his equipment from yesterday. As soon as I get off the bus I drag Iggy on over to the auditorium, knowing that we have five minutes before class, but Mr. Jugem makes it his business to obstruct us.

"Mister Koopa, where do you think you are going with your brother? It's almost time for class!"

"But we need to see Professor Gadd real quick!"

"No excuses. To class, Mister Koopa."

"That's Mister Von Koopa to you," I whisper. Excellent. Now I have to sit through my windbag teachers for four hours before I am free to visit the auditorium – and who knows if E. Gadd will still be there!

My windbag calculus teacher talks down to the class, quite rightfully, for they do not know the difference between the Chain Rule and chain-smoking. She makes no mention, however, of my brilliance, nor does she allow me to show off to the class. Again, what a windbag. It is tiring just to listen to her.

My English teacher hands me back my essay, which receives a 97 out of 100. He subtracted 3 points for not revising it. I tell him, why should I have to revise it if it was perfect to begin with. Teacher retorts, why did you make it so perfect to begin with if you knew you were going to have to revise it?

Gym class. I am graded down for not suiting up. Like I need soggy cotton sweats to soak up my sweat so they can reek. I am graded down further for not being able to hit my fitness benchmarks.

History teacher pops a quiz. The questions are exceedingly difficult, ambiguous, and not based on anything that he actually teaches. Luckily, I know all the answers. The exact same quiz is available online.

Finally, lunch time. I find Iggy in the cafeteria at the bench where he always sits with Lemmy, the two of them alone with their lunch.

"Iggy, we are getting your glasses back now!"

Lemmy says, "Yes, Mr. Jugem thought that King Dad is abusing us. I told him it was a family heirloom that Iggy was wearing for fun."

"Do you still want me to remove your intelligence?"

"Oh, yes!" says Lemmy, bouncing out of his seat. "Have you noticed that I haven't been on my ball in a while? My brain does not like it if I make the blood rush to any other part of my body. I miss playing around on my ball…"

"All right, but before I do that, I have some business to take care of in the auditorium… Iggy, you're coming with me."

Iggy blinks, and his monocle falls off. A bit of glass breaks off of it. I pick it up to examine it.

"Yes, we definitely have to get you a new pair – I mean, your glasses back."

I place the monocle back in his eye socket. "If you need to blink, try not to move the muscles around your eyebrow and cheekbone". I point to the places that I'm talking about.

I bring Iggy to the auditorium. I shrink back as the distant puff of white hair wiggles back and forth like an oversized dollop of whipped cream as Gadd totters back and forth, disassembling his inventions to be put away.

"Ok, Iggy, there's the monster that took your glasses!"

"Where?" Iggy lifts his monocle from his face and squints through it. He suddenly snarls and chases after the man.

I would have left the auditorium at that, without the intention of returning until I saw that Iggy was wearing the glasses, but the swirlies, visible even from the distance I was at, held me entranced once again.

Iggy chases Gadd from behind, taps on his back to make his head turn around, and swipes the glasses before Gadd even has the chance to see who it was.

Gadd stumbles around and crashes into my machine. He is apparently as blind as Iggy without those glasses.

Gadd fails to get up from where he is at. Perhaps I should be so lucky that he has broken a bone? I cautiously approach to see.

Gadd has, indeed, broken a leg, though still fully conscious. I finally get to see what sort of eyes he has behind those glasses – in theory. His eyes, tiny and black as seed beads, barely shine through the wrinkled folds that grace his eye sockets. The beads are completely swallowed by wrinkles as Gadd squints in an attempt to make out who I am.

"H-hiya… You are…"

"Prince Ludwig Von Koopa, Crown Prince of the Dark Land Empire, and certified super-genius like yourself."

"P-pleased to meet you, sonny," Gadd says, reaching his hand up in a slightly wrong direction to shake it, and flinching slightly at its scaly texture.

"Say, you wouldn't happened to have seen my glasses, have you? I simply cannot do without them; they're a very special prescription."

"Uh, I'm sorry, I have no idea who took your glasses," I lie through my teeth.

"Oh, well. Say, you wouldn't happen to be the whiz kid who whipped up that super doodad over there, would you?"

"Why, yes, I am."

I laugh internally at myself for fearing Gadd. There was nothing scary about him now that his glasses were gone. He is somewhat frightening in his eccentricity, but then again, so am I.

"Behold my ingenious Geniusificator! It does exactly what the name says – it increases your genius abilities! It has worked wonders for my siblings! Would you like to try it?"

"Say, sonny, that sounds fantastic! But I dunno, I mean, I may not be as sharp as I was as a young'un, but I think I can get along just fine without a shot from that, thank you very much!"

Hopefully he hadn't tinkered with the machine enough to discover how it works, that in theory, it would destroy his mind with insanity?

"You know how babies see everything upside down when they're born, and then their brain works to change its perception eventually so that the baby does not perceive the world as upside down?"

"Why, yes, I do. But there was apparently something wrong with my brain, as it never learned how to turn images right side up. That on top of the astigmatism and myopia and hyperopia and presbyopia and every other kind of "opia" I got as I got older."

"Well, my machine can do that! It can make your brain powerful enough to perceive everything clearly, even when viewed through a misshapen lens, just as a baby learns how to perceive everything right side up!"

"Really? That's swell! If it really does that, I won't have need for those silly googly goggles no more, no sirree! Would – would you help me into it? I am kind of paralyzed in my arthritis."

So I was wrong about the broken bone.

"No problem!" I eagerly hoist him into the Geniusificator and put the cap on.

As I toggle through the settings, I am suddenly torn between two deviously brilliant choices. Hmm, shall I boost his genius until it degenerates to madness, or shall I test the reverse setting and shove his IQ into the negative zone? Decisions, decisions…

Does it really matter? I decided. I pull the lever, having made the decision according to my gut whims. I laugh feverishly, my body quaking near the point of collapse with sick excitement.


	8. To Stupefy and reStupefy

(Disclaimer: I am tired of writing the disclaimer. Know from now on, I own nothing in subsequent chapters.)

Gadd's puff of hair frizzes out from the bolt that crashed through his skull. He makes no sound. When it is over, as I remove the helmet, Gadd falls over like a limp marionette.

I pick him up and feel him on the chest. No pulse, no breath. He is out cold – perhaps for good.

My Geniusificator is designed to deliver a targeted shock to the cranium and nowhere else, so there was no way it would have stopped his heart. Nor would it have touched any parts of the brain besides specific parts of the cerebral cortex, so there was no way it would have fried anything to do with his vital functions. I reassembled the machine properly, even double-checking to assure that I did.

I had subjected Gadd to the reverse setting, and I had confirmed my theory that it was possible to be too dumb to function.

Gadd is dead – not dead beyond repair; he could easily be defibrillated back to life, and he could be soaked in formaldehyde for years and still be revivable – but this was exactly what I, in my twisted, roundabout way, had been planning. Why would I want to bring him back to life? To terrorize me further with the googly specs?

I laugh and laugh and _laugh._ I laugh myself into a state of delirium, my body tingling beyond feeling so that I can no longer stand. I gasp for breath between spasms – I am, not for the first time in my life, giggle-sick.

My vision is all swirls from the tears that had formed. When they evaporate, I see Wendy, Lemmy, Morton and Larry.

"What the hell is so damn funny?" asks Morton.

"Oh… Gadd… he and I were sharing this little joke, and it was hilarious beyond all reason!" I suppress the further laughter that was now erupting as a result of the sick lie and joke I was about to tell them. "And Gadd laughed so much that he passed out into a COMA!" ( I tend to SHOUT at the end of my sentences when I am feeling giggly.)

"Well, would you mind telling us the joke?" asks Morton.

"No, it's a little over your heads…" as I was used to telling them.

"Have you forgotten that you made us into geniuses? Speaking of which, we want to be normal again right now!"

"Ok, ok… First victim?"

Wendy shoves Morton out of her way. I am somewhat hesitant to do this, after what it has done to Gadd, but I reassure myself that I am only putting Wendy back under the broad part of the bell curve, not into a state of sub-retardation.

I turn the machine on, and my heart feels jolted when I see the lightning pulse through Wendy's bow.

"Wendy, are you all right?"

"I'm…"

"Tell me, what's tan thirty degrees?"

"Ugh… you can't get a tan in that kind of weather!"

Good. She's back to normal.

"All right, next victim?"

I return Morton to normal, but I hesitate at Larry.

"Larry, I thought you enjoyed having intelligence."

"Well, I did create a video game. It's called Larry Koopa: Zombie Heartbreaker. But uh, there are certain things that I used to enjoy more back when I wasn't so smart, and, uh, it's just not me to have this kind of intellect. If I were meant to be a genius, I would have been born a genius like you."

No desire to get into an existential argument with Larry, of all people. He comes out of the Geniusificator complaining about frizzy electrified helmet hair.

Finally, I do Lemmy. Lemmy is initially thrilled to be bouncing around again, but then he cries about having forgotten to bring his ball to school.

"You never bring your ball to school, remember? Mr. Jugem always takes it away."

"Oh. Right." Lemmy skips away ball-less but happy.

Now the only thing that remained to be done was to figure out what to do with Gadd…

"KOOKY! HE'S TRYING TO MAKE ME WEAR AN ICE CREAM CONE BECAUSE I COULDN'T DO THE SCARY MATH PROBLEMS!"

Not to mention Roy…

Roy shoves the dunce cap onto Iggy's head. "It's not an ice cream cone, it's a dunce cap, you cretinous idiot!"

"Roy! Technically, Iggy is an imbecile, not an idiot. He was reevaluated this year, remember?"

"Yeah, but I don't think he'll ever make it up to moron!"

Iggy takes off the hat and looks inside. "Snow cone?"

"Yes, you can have snow in it if you can tell me what a conic section is!"

"No! More scary math!"

Clearly, I cannot allow Roy to continue to be intelligent.

I drag E. Gadd's corpse over by the Geniusificator machine.

"Roy, look at this!"

Roy takes the bait. "Maaaannnn…. What did you do to him?"

Swift as lightning, I shove Roy into the Geniusificator, slam the helmet onto his head, and crank his IQ back to two digits.

Roy is not happy. "Why, I'm gonna POUND you for that!"

"I doubt it," I say, shaking my head. "Why, considering all the muscle mass you've lost from studying rather than pounding others, I highly doubt that you're in any shape to pound anybody right now."

Roy squeezes his bicep and gasps. "You're right! I bedda head out to da gym!"

Brains beats brawn again. Roy was wise to wish to remain that way.

At least he forgot about Gadd…

Iggy looks at Gadd. "You slayed the monster, didn't you, Ludwig?"

It wasn't often that Iggy used my proper name. He stared up at me with the thick glasses that used to be E. Gadd's. I shiver a bit as I stare into the swirls, but I soon realize that they are not moving.

Whatever phantasm that haunted Gadd's eyewear had died with him.

I tentatively remove the glasses to inspect. The lenses are flat. Not the slightest degree of concavity or convexity.

I try them on. Everything looks the same; perhaps slightly sharper, but that must be my imagination, for I have 20/20 vision

"Iggy, can you see out of these?" I place the glasses back on his head.

I hold up two fingers. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Two," says Iggy, without pausing to count them by finger, as he normally does.

Strange. Gadd must have been a fantastic inventor to have created glasses that not only corrected vision via some other, perhaps secret method besides refraction, but that corrected the vision of anyone, regardless of prescription.

I disassemble my Geniusificator and put the parts back in the wagon. This time, I am carrying a little extra weight in the wagon. It would, after all, be a shame to allow E. Gadd's body – and especially his brain – to go to waste. I could go play around with his brain for a little bit.

I do enjoy playing with brains…

**In case you thought the story was over…**

**Not even close! ;D**

**Mwahahahahahahah…..**


	9. The Brain

Nobody notices that I had Gadd buried underneath the disassembled machine parts as I drag the wagon back to the castle. My mind is already churning with thoughts on what to do with the body parts, particularly the brain. Oh, what to do, what to do…

I triple-lock the door to my lab, and toss the machine parts aside to get to my prize. The corpse is already stiffening from rigor mortis. Nothing a little of my enriched formaldehyde solution can't fix.

I would have to take careful precautions not to disfigure the body beyond repair, for if the authorities ever found out, I would have to be able to revive Gadd lest the Mushroom Kingdom calls off the truce that they have made with Dark Land.

I use an ultra-fine laser to slice open the skull along the sagittal plane. My attempt at removal of the left side of the skull is obstructed by the left eyeball, still attached to the socket. I laser it apart from the muscles and observe it.

The eyeball itself is extremely elongated, indicating nearsightedness so extreme that without glasses Gadd wouldn't be able to see his hand thirty centimeters from his face. The lens is also misshapen, indicating severe astigmatism. Being legally blind, Gadd should be considered lucky to be put out of his misery.

I carefully laser-saw the spinal cord and the meninges so that the brain is ready for removal. I run my claws over it and squeeze it with relish. I love the feel of cerebral tissue.

My own brain feels somewhat fuzzy. I am lost on what to do with it. I could revive it, and try to create a way to read its thoughts… oh, wait, I already figured out how to do that. Or, I could design a way to control its thoughts and actions! – oh, wait, I have done that too.

"Gaaah!" I throw the brain to the floor. I am the master of brains! What else could I possibly do with it?

I need my caffeine. Now that Gadd was incapacitated in my lab, I no longer had need to worry about running into him at Shellz.

As I exit my lab, I briefly consider asking the kitchen staff to fix me one. _ Nein_, King Dad hired the lousiest cooks this side of Mushroom Kingdom Academy. They take too long, and their Koopaccinos don't taste quite as good as the ones that Shellz makes.

I run on over to Shellz, operating on adrenaline stimulated by the thought of having a delicious caffeine fix.

I find that Iggy and Lemmy are there, trying to order themselves milkshakes.

Lemmy is standing on top of Iggy, pressing the vanilla cream icon on the touch screen.

"Hey, Kooky!" he says. "I'm just trying to order a vanilla milkshake…"

"Go back and select chocolate cream," I tell him, "and then select white chocolate, and then the vanilla flavor shot, and then the second shot each of white chocolate and vanilla. It's far richer and tastier than the vanilla cream."

"White chocolate! Mmm! Thanks, Kooky!" Lemmy takes my advice, and Iggy presses the icon for dark chocolate milkshake and then stops when he gets to the flavor shots screen.

"Umm… what flavor should I get, Kooky?"

"Raspberry is good," I suggest. "And the double shot each of raspberry and chocolate." He takes my suggestion. Of course, raspberry is better with a shot of vanilla, but I'm not going to harass the Troopa working here to get him an extra flavor shot that he likely won't notice anyway.

I harass him instead for a double white chocolate double espresso mocha with a shot each of caramel, hazelnut and vanilla. I even come up with the idea to ask him to use the Austrian roast, which isn't typically used for the made-to-order Koopaccinos. He gives me the same shit about tax and extra costs, and is once again denied a tip. Tips are not standard here anyway. Insolent civil servant punk.

I exult in the warmth, flavor, and chemical inspiration as I sip through the straw in the sunlight. I had for the past few days perceived the sunlight as calming and blissful. That is not the way it should be.

I return to the darkness and to my element. I find that my lab door was left open. I sigh as I deadbolt it. I really needed that double shot of espresso.

My thoughts are EXTREMELY CLEAR now. My past inventions involving study of the brain have only been tested on living brains that had never been completely removed from the body! Never before had I brought a disembodied brain BACK TO LIFE!

I lift the brain off the floor and begin to prepare microscopic slides of the neurons, exploding into another spasm of giggles – but this time, a controlled spasm of giggles.

I work well into the night, not even stopping for dinner, taking notes on the brain structure, doing figures in my head, and reassembling my Geniusificator, this time with a few tweaks to it.

I place Gadd's brain into my largest beaker, fill it with a nutrient-enriched solution, and fix it to an artificial circulatory system-slash-respirator that I had whipped up tonight. I attach it to the brain at the stem and with a network of artificial blood vessels that I had grown in a petri dish with the help of my time acceleration chamber. I fill the artificial circulatory and respiratory system with some of Gadd's own blood. The blood would need to be changed repeatedly; this setup would have to do until I got around to inventing a blood recycler.

The final step. I attach the brain to electrodes from my newly modified Geniusificator.

The machine had a built-in brain activity monitor. There is no activity for the brain currently. I turn the crank up and laugh as I watch the flashy spasms of electrical activity, much of which, truth be told, is for show.

The brain activity monitor is lit up in all the regions that it should be. Gadd's brain is alive again!

"YEEEESSSS!" I laugh and giggle like I never had before.

I imagine what Gadd must be thinking. What kind of afterlife has he just been yanked from? Does he know he's a living but disembodied brain at the moment? Ooh, what exactly_ is_ he thinking? I will have to find my old Brainwave Analyzer and find out!

I hear a knocking through my dead bolted lab door and I scream. Who dares to ruin this beautiful moment of mine?

"Kooky…?" I hear Iggy's voice before I even unlock the door.

"I can't sleep," he says.

Certainly my laughter, even at this moment, cannot be heard but vaguely through the meter-long steel and concrete lab walls! It must be…

_Sheisse!_ I had forgotten to give Iggy his psychiatric medications!

I had been so preoccupied with the horror of Gadd's glasses that I had completely forgotten my duty to my little brother!

I hastily grab his meds out of the pill cabinet and let him in.


	10. Pills

Iggy has been prescribed so many different medications for his psychiatric ailments that our father, not wanting to bother to keep track of a dozen or so different types of pills, delegated the responsibility of doling out the medication to me.

Iggy takes a stimulant medication to treat his ADHD in the mornings, and a different stimulant to treat it in the afternoons, and at night and at various times throughout the day he takes three different antipsychotics to treat his bizarre behavior, sedate him and help him to sleep. Side effects include drooling, dilated pupils and worse, so he takes medications to treat the side effects of those drugs, and medications to treat the side effects of the drugs that he takes to treat his side effects.

It is my personal opinion that Iggy is drastically overmedicated, but the psychiatrists, of course, don't listen; besides, they earn more coins for each medication the prescribe, and who's a better target than the demented son of a king too uneducated to know what the drugs are doing to his son, too busy (or lazy) to bother with his son when he's not sedated from pill cocktails, and too rich not to pay for it all.

I had once taken many of these medications myself, but when I got mature enough to control my behavior in public, the psychiatrist decided to wean me off of the medication.

"Here, these will help you to fall asleep," I tell him.

I hand him one of the fast-acting antipsychotics to put him to sleep fast and one of the slow-acting antipsychotics to keep him asleep. I hand them out one at a time, instructing Iggy to swallow whole instead of chewing. I hand him some blue-dyed water to help him with the swallowing.

"Thank you, Ludwig," he says to me, staring up at me through the thick swirly lenses of E. Gadd's glasses.

After a fraction of a second of stillness, I imagine that I see a swirling motion to the swirls. I blink and the swirling disappears.

I hastily escort him out the lab door.

The – the double-shot of Austrian roast must have been a shock to my system, that's all. I hadn't had it on a regular basis since I was a Frankenstein University student, after all. Or maybe I am simply… tired… the caffeine did not seem to be as effective lately as it normally was. I had even created drugs that I used regularly on myself to prevent myself from becoming caffeine tolerant.

I am nervous and tired at the same time. Hyper-alert and drowsy. I yawn while my heart buzzes. My brain buzzes too, but perhaps the clarity is only an illusion?

I drop the container of slow-acting antipsychotic tablets. I drop to all fours to find them all and put them back in the jar.

When I grab the first pill off the floor, I notice that it looks different from the quetiapine tablets that were supposed to be in that container. Smaller, off-white instead of white, longer and thinner in its oval shape…

I recognize it. One of Larry's male performance enhancement tablets. Ugh.

All of the other tablets on the floor turn out to be the same.

I just gave Iggy a boner medication!

That cheat Larry must have taken the pills for his own drug amusement pleasure and replaced them with his own, probably expired pills (it was not often that a girl allowed him to see any action, after all). Though I don't know why he would choose the quetiapine; the blue amphetamine tablets used to treat Iggy's ADHD seemed a far likelier target…

I check the other containers; they all appear to contain their respective medications.

I guess Iggy will just wake up in an hour or so, possibly wetting the bed as well. But then, he very frequently wets the bed anyway. Wish the psychiatrists would prescribe him something to treat that…

Back to my little project. I suddenly remember where I kept my old Transmutational Brainwave Analyzer.

I put the helmet over the beaker that Gadd's brain is in, laughing insanely as the paper prints out. My claws trembling, I try to focus my bugged-out eyes on what has been printed on it.

I read the first sentence:

_Have you ever thought to build your own Koopaccino maker to put in here, sonny?_

Strange first thought. Still, an infuriatingly simple idea that I should have thought of before! Of course, I have always been so busy working on other projects, but a Koopaccino maker would be a snap compared to what I normally build!

I want to thank Gadd, but I realize that I had never invented a brain communication device. I make a note of myself to build one after I am done with the Koopaccino machine.

I had seen the personnel at Shellz open up their Koopaccino machine to refill it before, so I knew exactly how it worked. I can make it out of IV bags, some old pipes and faucets (after having shrunken them with my shrink ray, of course), the motor to a hair dryer to heat up the water, and some welded-together sheets of metal.

As a finishing touch, I paint the varnish with an epic view of alpine Austria. Although I am most renowned for my music, it being my favorite of the fine arts, I am quite accomplished at the visual arts as well.

Now, the only things that were missing were the drink ingredients. I would have to go out to the kitchen to obtain coffee beans, milk, and flavor syrup.

I remember my last venture to the kitchen. It was merely a dream, but it still had me chilled at the thought of visiting that place.

I shake it off. I want easy access to Koopaccino drinks, damn it!

I exit my laboratory, this time triple-checking the triple-lock on the door.


	11. In the Pantry

I drag my wagon in the kitchen, a setting all too eerily familiar to my recent subconscious memory.

It appears that the palace guards were on break, which is good, for otherwise, I might jump at the sight of one of them.

I open the pantry and step in. Such a dizzying array of foodstuffs! Sugar, flour, chips, jars of candy, canned pasta, canned vegetables, canned meat, canned mushrooms… Ahh, the syrup!

I load one of each of the flavors of syrup into the wagon. There is not an incredibly vast variety; I will have to go out and buy the rest.

I find some jars of ground coffee, and some jars of crystallized instant coffee. I turn my nose up at these. Only freshly ground beans will do.

I finally find a bag of coffee beans. Expired, probably, and not of a remarkably distinct variety. I nevertheless take them. I can go shopping for some gourmet roasted flavored beans later.

Finally, I open the refrigerator to get my milk.

My choice is between two percent or skim. Both pasteurized, both homogenized. Ugh.

In Austria, we only used raw milk, whole and fresh from the cow's udder – or goat's or sheep's, for that matter; we utilized a greater variety of lactating ungulates for mammary nutrition over there.

I take the two percent. I groan, but then I had been enjoying the practically ready-made Koopaccinos at Shellz for long enough; what was I complaining about? Still, if I was going to make them myself, I might as well make them the right way…

After I put the milk in the wagon, I turn around to close the refrigerator door. As I do so, I jump at a CRASH! from the wagon behind me.

Iggy. He had sneaked into the food pantry again. His head was covered by a potato chip bag. I would have to see about refilling his prescription.

"You are supposed to be in bed, Iggy!" I pull the potato chip bag off of his head.

"But I can't… sleep…"

Gadd's glasses. The swirls. Oh no. My nightmare had been a premonition!

I cannot not blink my way out of this nightmare. My eyelids refuse to block Iggy/Gadd's hypnotic swirly gaze.

I back off slowly from Iggy, but he continues to walk, zombie-like, in my direction.

What was the purpose? Why was Iggy doing this to me? Was it Iggy, or Gadd, or the glasses?

I attempt to solve it, but I simply cannot. This frightens me. I am supposed to be able to solve ANY problem, and I can't even think of how to BEGIN to solve this one!

I – uh, I have a thought, but it escapes me. My full powers of concentration are on the swirling.

Am I being de-geniusified? I attempt to generate a differential equation in my head for myself to solve.

Can't do it. Can't even compute two plus two.

I fall down onto my butt, the spikes on my shell digging against the kitchen wall.

My eyes burn from prolonged oxygen exposure. I open my mouth to tell Iggy to go away, to scream, to say something, but my vocal chords won't function.

Powers of elo-elo-what? Failing… This must be how… how, how what?

_De-de-I'm de-whatified…_

?

**Yes, this one was a shortie, but there's more coming later! ;3**


	12. Question Mark

My intellectual faculties are in full power once again. The swirling is gone. Good.

_What a funny dream_, I think blissfully. The whole ordeal was just a horror story woven by my brilliant subconscious. I ought to take up writing – I can _literally_ write horror stories in my sleep.

I am sleeping right now. I see nothing. Everything's black – no, not even black, just sightless no-color. There is no sound above the harmonic buzz of my thoughts. And I feel nothing, for my body is fully paralyzed in the REM stage of sleep. How soothing. I ought to sleep more often…

_What a funny dream…_

_And I'm fully aware of it…_

_!_

I had not mastered the art of lucid dreaming yet – one would have to actually sleep every night to do that – and I am conscious in my subconscious?

_I'm not sleeping!_

Am I blind? I try to blink my eyelids, but it seems that I don't have eyelids to blink, not even dream eyelids. Not even the phantom pain of eyelids that had been ripped out.

No… feeling… no senses… Am I dead?

_Not quite_.

That thought, foreign from my own – accompanied by laughter, to the tenor of a different sense of humor – jumps into my mind.

It… strikes me of Gadd. Gadd, whose disembodied brain is floating in a beaker-

It suddenly occurs to me what has happened.

_I'm a disembodied brain myself! Noooooo….._

The laughter, Gadd's laughter, that's invading my mind is far from sadistic; it sounds warm and grandfatherly, yet well past slightly eccentric…

And they call _me_ Kooky.

_How did you do this?_ I ask Gadd's spirit. _Did you reanimate your body?_ Being the world's leading expert on the science of the paranormal, Gadd would be the most likely person in the world to know how to be a powerful ghost.

Gadd's spirit laughs warmly_. I just wanted to say, thank you, sonny, for freeing me into the ghost world! I have wanted to be a ghost my entire life! However, there is one thing I simply cannot do without…_

Spectral flashes dance before my mind's eye. They flash by too fast for me to tell if they vaguely resemble Gadd.

_My glasses._

_What do you need your glasses for? You're a GHOST!_

_Well, you see, sonny, before you came along and did what you did, I always thought that a trip to the other side was a one-way trip. And if I ever want to come back to share with the folks on the live side, well, I will simply be quite helpless without them!_

_Helpless! If you're so helpless, then how did you do this to me! You didn't answer my question!_

_Isn't it fantastic! _

_No, it's not fantastic to be stuck in a beaker or jar or petri dish or whatever you put me in!_

_Well, you just say that because you're not spiritually attuned enough to fly free like me!_

The spectral images turn brighter and multicolored. At one moment I could have sworn that I saw Gadd's form.

_I demand to know why you did this to me!_

_Why, it was just sooo fantastic I just had to show you how it felt!_

No sarcasm. Was he really that much of a kook, or was the sarcasm implied?

_I'm sorry for doing that to you, I'm sorry, I'm sooo sorry… but… how? Did you reanimate your body?_

Gadd laughed and laughed, making me impatient_. It was your brother Iggy's body that did this to you._ He laughed some more_. You know, the one that's got my googly specs_.

Gadd's voice was sounding stronger and stronger, as though it was actually coming through my currently absent ears. There was no blinking to shut out the glare of the specters that burned into the neurons of my visual cortex. Looking more like Gadd than ever, the multicolored phantasms played ring-around-the-rosy in my mind's eye, faster and faster until they became a winding blur, that spun and spun until a trickle began to leak in toward the center, causing the whole ectoplasmic carousel to drain like a whirlpool, to become…

A _swirl_.

_Put me back in my body! Right this instant! We Koopas have got powerful allies on the other side too, you know!_

Gadd laughs at the false bravado of my thoughts. His laughter eventually begins to fade in and fade out, cyclically and undampened, like the swirl itself.

If I could only kill off my brain with thoughts… for the artificial respirator and circulatory system wouldn't do the job.


	13. Body Building

My brain jolts. Breath flows back into my lungs. Light flows back into my skull. My eardrums once again vibrate from the dull sounds filling the castle that can be heard in the basement. I feel the cold laboratory concrete on my tail.

I am back in my body.

Or maybe my brain never really had been removed?

Perhaps Gadd's spirit was warning me of the consequences if I don't return him to his body?

I need a Koopaccino. I press the buttons on the machine – one for hot, one for iced, and one for frozen coffee. None of them dispense anything.

I must have left the ingredients in the kitchen.

The kitchen was the last place I remembered being at while I was conscious. So why was I now in my lab?

Perhaps Gadd _had_ done the operation after all!

While controlling Iggy's body, with the googly specs…

Which kept Iggy awake all night, wandering around the food pantry like a zombie, even more so than normal…

I _have_ to return Gadd's brain to his body!

I search frantically for Gadd's body. It then hits me that my entire lab reeks of rancid blood.

Gadd's body was right next to the beaker with his brain in it. I had forgotten to soak his leftover body parts in preservation fluid.

I toss the body into the tank of revitalizing serum and begin to remove the brain from the contraption.

I swear that I can still hear Gadd's voice in my mind.

_Hey, that tickles!_

I fully deactivate the brain before removing the body from the tank. The effects of the serum, plus the loss of blood, has made the skin on the body parts look blanched and pale. The skin is less wrinkled, though, and the famous liver spots are gone.

I reattach the brain to the severed end of the spinal cord using an electrode that stimulates the dormant nerve cells to reconnect with each other.

I reattach the one eyeball that I removed from the muscles in the eye socket using a surgical glue that I use for attaching muscles to one another. I use another variety for reattaching the severed hemispheres of the skull, and I use a laser to stitch the skin together.

Bloodless. I search my blood stores for human blood. Not knowing what blood type Gadd is, I use type O, the universal donor.

I connect him to an IV machine to fill up his blood vessels while I blow dry his clothing and hair.

Ready to be jolted back to life.

Only one thing was missing.

The dreaded googly specs.

I check the time. About a quarter till 6 AM. Too early for Iggy to be taking his pills.

But perhaps Iggy is asleep…

But what if the glasses aren't?

I must brave it, I tell myself. I must.

I sneak into Iggy's room, and sure enough, he's asleep in the bottom bunk, with Lemmy on the top.

Iggy went to bed with the glasses on.

Dipstick.

I shut my eyes. The swirlies have no power over me if I shut my eyes…

I fumble around Iggy's bed until I feel the glasses and take them.

I run with the glasses in hand, staring up at the ceiling so that I don't have to look at the glasses and can still see where I'm going out of the edges of my eyes –

I crash into one of King Dad's stupid statues of himself – the ones that breathe fire when the castle is under Mario lockdown.

The glasses fly up out of my hands and high into the air.

I visually calculate the trajectory of the pair of specs and run to that location.

I feel the glasses brush my hair. I turn around to look.

The glasses, which had been caught in my hair, are tossed out when I whip my head around to look for them, and they hit the Bowser statue and clatter to the floor.

I rush to pick them up, feeling them without looking.

Not broken. Good.

Perhaps Gadd constructed them out of an unbreakable material?

Once in my lab, I place the glasses on the table, the front side facing the opposite direction so that I don't look into them when I go to get them back, and I place Gadd, his face facing the opposite direction, into the seat of the Geniusificator.

I place the glasses onto the backward-facing Gadd, attach the helmet, and turn the machine on to the desired setting.

**Seems tempting to end at thirteen chapters, doesn't it? Well, the story isn't over until I say it's over…**


	14. FrankenGadd

After the lightning show, Gadd falls out of the chair, his hair a white frizzball. I cringe, but I accidentally catch a glimpse of the swirlies on the glasses.

The swirlies are still.

I tentatively poke Gadd's nose with my claw.

"Hey, sonny, watch them claws!"

Gadd pushes himself up on his own. My revitalizing serum must have done wonders for his arthritis.

Gadd's skin is still an eerie pickled color, and his skin on the one side of his face appears to be patched on, with creases where I had laser-sutured it together. These features will likely fade in a few days.

"Well, so you're the Prince Ludwig I have heard so much about!" he says, shaking my hand with vigor. I stare at his glasses, foolishly waiting for the swirlies to move again.

"I've gotta say, thank you, sonny, for the adventure of a lifetime! Few people who have been to the other side have lived to tell the tale! And I also wanna thank you for soaking my old bones in that revitalizing serum. Why, I feel like a spring chicken again!"

Gadd jumped and gamboled around for a bit as if he were a child. I wonder if he remembered terrorizing me while I was either dreaming or a brain in a jar?

"Um, I'm, uh…" I stare at the ground. I am not used to fumbling for words. "You… were ghosting around in my brain, weren't you?"

"Um, no, I don't think I ever did get inside that fantastic noodle of yours. But I'll say, I'll have _some_ story to tell my granddaughter! She fancies you, you know."

No wonder he's heard so much about me.

"But you don't remember being involved in any experiments on me?"

"Nope. I remember everything like it was crystal clear, sonny, and I don't remember doin' no funnin' around with your body."

I am attuned to the notes of a person's vocal rhythm just as I am to the notes of an instrument. There is no discord of guile in his voice.

"Now thanks again for everything, and that Geniusificating-thingamajiggy of yours gets my FAN-TASTIC seal of approval, but I've gotta get going-"

"WAIT!"

Gadd turns around. "What is it, sonny?"

"About your glasses… how do… they… work?" My voice is small and hesitant.

"Are you sure you wanna know, sonny? You seem like a curious young'un to me, but you look a bit spooked whenever you look into this snazzy pair of specs."

"I, uh…" My mind clams up in fear.

"I say, you seem out of sorts, boy. Have you been overtaking your medicine?"

"I don't take medicine!"

"Well, perhaps you should, then? But the right sort, of course." He winks at me (although I am not sure how I know that considering the opacity of his glasses).

I know exactly what kind of medicine I need.

"I need a Koopaccino…"

"Well, there, sonny boy, you better get your Koopaccino maker up and running. I wouldn't go back to that Shellz place if I were you. Did you read the rest of the paper you printed off of that Transmutational Brainwave Analyzer?"

"Uh…"

"Good, then. Say hi to King Koopa for me! Ciao!"

After Gadd is gone, I leave to fetch the Koopaccino ingredients that I left in the pantry. I run into Iggy, who is wearing a new pair of glasses and carrying a jar of the prescription that we were out of.

"Hi Ludwig! I got new glasses and pills!"

"I see. Now, give Kooky the pills…"

Iggy runs off with the pill container, laughing.

No matter. The cap is childproof, and most certainly Iggy-proof.

I find my wagon full of coffee ingredients, exactly as I left it. I throw out the milk, having been out all night, if not longer (exactly how long was I a brain in a jar, or unconscious, or whatever?) and get a fresh jug out of the fridge. Guess skim will have to do for now. I take a stick of butter to replace the richness of flavor lost from the absence of fat.

My scales take on an odd pallor when I view them in the refrigerator light. Koopa scales do not normally show color change from enduring the circumstances of death and fluid preservation, but they are translucent enough so that the state of the skin beneath them can be determined in the right light.

It's refrigerator light. Everything looks paler in it, I tell myself; the current state of affairs has merely sensitized you to it.

My head aches like it's been split in half…

I return to my lab to find the door wide open.

Now, I made SURE this time around that it was _quadruple_-locked.

I race in, praying that Iggy hasn't destroyed anything this time.

The lab is silent and empty. Good.

I lock the door as tightly as I did last time, lost on how to lock it tighter. I dump the beans and the milk (with the butter in it) into their respective compartments and turn it on.

I must wait for the beans to grind and dissolve into the hot water.

It only takes a few minutes, but I want my Koopaccino NOW. I didn't build my own Koopaccino maker so that I would have to wait as long for a drink as I do at Shellz.

I turn around and immediately begin to design a Koopaccino maker with a built-in time accelerator to eliminate the startup wait time.

I perk up when the machine makes the READY! beep that I programmed it to do.

At the same time, and coming from the same direction, I hear a maniacal laughter, more hyper and manic than my own.

I turn around and I see Iggy standing on top of the Koopaccino maker, with the top open, twisting the cap of his pill container.

"Iggy, NO!" I scream. But it's a scared rather than the firm sound I was going for.

Iggy ignores me and dumps the entire contents of the pill container into my coffee.

"AAAAHHHH-HA-HA-!"

**The End**

**?**

**Please review and tell me what you think happened!**


	15. SWIRLS

**Well, I had originally finished this story, but some reviewers seemed to have been confused by the ending, so I decided to write another chapter for clarification. Enjoy!**

Frantic, I dash around my lab until I find a vial of tranquilizer serum. I then load it into a syringe and place the syringe into a tranquilizer gun.

Iggy runs and hops around, grabbing Erlenmeyer flasks off the shelves and spilling them together on the floor to see what would happen.

I wait until he is enthralled by a chemical fire that he had started before aiming and pulling the trigger.

I shoot Iggy in the forehead, which knocks him out almost instantly.

I then place Iggy into a container made of unbreakable glass. He would almost undoubtedly wake up soon, and however he was getting into my lab, he needed to be put somewhere that he couldn't get out of.

Hopefully.

I am majorly stressed. My entire body cries out for a Koopaccino.

But Iggy had ruined the entire contents of my Koopaccino machine by dumping his antipsychotic quetiapine tablets into it. No telling how they would affect me if I drank it…

I need to empty it out and sterilize it. But that will have to wait. I need a Koopaccino NOW.

I exit my lab, rather hesitantly, for I wasn't sure exactly when Iggy would wake up from that tranquilizer (he normally required a very large dose of anesthetic to quell his hyper metabolism-endowed body for longer than an hour. Maybe I should give him another shot, just in case…

No. I do not want him to be TOO drowsy. King Dad would be quite upset if he found out I tranquilized him again.

I once again visit Shellz. I request a frozen mint-flavored double espresso double dark chocolate mocha.

I salivate at the thought of drinking intoxicatingly delicious dark chocolate as the frustrated employee blends the ice with the coffee, milk, chocolate and mint flavor, and then sprays whipped cream with a chocolate drizzle.

I suck down a strawful of it. The drink is not sweet enough. I request a third pump of chocolate, and a shot of vanilla as well.

"With pleasure". The Troopa employee bares a false grin, a vein throbbing in his temple. He takes my drink, hides beneath the counter and hands it back.

I take another sip. "Aah, just right". I pay the employee for the third pump of chocolate and the shot of vanilla, plus extra for actually showing some effort this time.

The chocolate is good. Well, good for not being gourmet-caliber European chocolate. I briefly consider going to the fresh foods market to pick up some imported coffee beans, raw milk and assorted flavored syrups, but the caffeine makes me even more nervous about Iggy escaping. I tell myself, that's illogical. How can he escape?

I return to the lab, and Iggy is still asleep. I pace around, trying to remember what I was going to do.

Oh yeah! I was going to dump the medicated contents of my Koopaccino maker out, then build it with a time accelerator so that I wouldn't have to wait for my drinks, and then…

I step on a piece of paper.

I pick it up and at a glance I realize it was the paper that was printed off of the Transmutational Brain Analyzer to tell me what Gadd's thoughts were. It was this paper that initially gave me the idea to build the Koopaccino maker. I suddenly realized that I never read the rest of it. It says:

_I caught that naughty brother of yours striking a deal with an employee at Shellz that he was only too happy to accept._

Grrr! Even under invasive brain analysis, Gadd's thoughts are still cryptic!

_You really should have treated your civil servants better. Oh, and you had really better renew your brother's prescription…_

My heart palpitates, and with a flash of shock I acutely recall what Gadd said shortly before leaving:

"_I wouldn't go back to that Shellz place if I were you…"_

My widened eyeballs turn over to Iggy.

So it was him, my demented, sub-moronic, hare-brained brother, who… who…

Iggy stretched out his limbs and yawned. He sat up in his escape-proof chamber and turned his head toward me.

No… I dread seeing his face, even before I see it. At least I now know why…

But now I no longer know. For the moment, but for much longer according to my drug-impaired mind, I know nothing but swirls, swirls, on Iggy's brand-new glasses, swirls…

I perceive Iggy's laughter, and my mind makes a small scream of horror, the moment before it is drowned, all knowing suffocated, all perception smothered, except for the perception of… swirls…

_**SWIRLS**__**SWIRLS**_**SWIRLSSWIRLSSWIRLS**SWIRLSSWIRLSSWIRLS SWIRLS …..


End file.
